


Till A’ The Seas Gang Dry

by AMarguerite



Series: Something Rich and Strange [3]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Gay Relationship, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, World War II
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 07:02:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6108793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Dunkirk, Ralph gets posted as a lieutenant on an armed trawler. Laurie gets pneumonia, a hospital stay, and Bim. He could really do without all three. Too bad Bim could really do with an honest conversation about Ralph.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Till A’ The Seas Gang Dry

**Author's Note:**

> I mostly consulted this archive for information about WWII: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/. Apologies in advance for historical inaccuracies!

From a medical perspective, Alec and Sandy shouldn’t have given him a pass. Laurie sniffled and coughed his way off the bus, wondering if his treatments of the Wonder Drug were sufficient to beat back his pneumonia a second time. He felt himself regressing back to the stage of illness where air molecules had turned into Luftwaffe planes ordered to directly attack him.

“I  _ am _ sorry,” said Peter, who had missed a streak of engine grease across his forehead before coming to meet Laurie at the stop, “but I didn’t know who else there was to call-- Bertie’s got no family, and the boy friend is off on hush hush work across the Channel and has no forwarding address. And I couldn’t think of anyone else in his Oxford set close enough...”

Laurie tried to think through the haze of phlegm and exhaustion. “Er, there’s Mowbray. But you’re right, he’s at Bletchley now. Chalky’s training in Edinburgh. Squiffy-- no, he was shot down last week. And...”

And the others were all dead. Laurie realized this with a little start of surprise.  Bertie’s friends been Laurie’s friends too, the quiet art and music lovers who hated Charles Fortescue’s parties, but were forever being unwillingly forced to attend them, who didn’t like ever saying the word ‘queer’ but, in varying degrees of defiance and unhappiness, were always talking about it. 

Peter had moved in similar circles at the local university, though through a snobbery he never could quite manage to uproot, Laurie had always been more comfortable with Peter’s boy friend, Theo Sumner. Theo had gone to RNVR officer training instead of his final year at Cambridge- just as Laurie had done with Oxford. Their experiences and signals were so much more similar. Ralph’s Cambridge friend Bim Taylor had once joked that the difference between Oxbridge queers and the rest of the world was that they all dropped hairpins about Tchaikovsky instead of calling themselves friends of Dorothy, like normal people.

Laurie had never much liked Bim.

“So, you see,” said Peter, unhappily, “we all have to make shift as best we can. I’ll lift you back to hospital if you aren’t feeling quite the thing.”

“Quite alright,” Laurie rasped out. He tried to summon some of the old head prefect manner. “If you can lift me back to Bertie’s place, that’s all I need. The Alexanders fixed up a late pass for me, so there’s plenty of buses I can catch back to the hospital. What’s happened to poor old Bertie? Can’t be too serious if they’re packing him back to his place already.”

It was a bit more serious than that, as it turned out, and Peter awkwardly limped through it. There was a sort of embarrassed divide between RAF mechanics and pilots. The mechanics all felt slightly guilty that they got to remain on the ground, and that, though they could put back together all the broken Spitfires, they could do nothing for the pilots. 

Bertie had bailed out after one of the wings of his Spitfire had been shot off in last night’s air raid. The other members of his squadron had tried to circle him, to prevent his parachute from being destroyed by enemy fire, but, in the end, at least two and a half Spitfires and a Hurricane were now smoldering in what had once been an apple orchard. Bertie had been the only survivor. He had dragged himself out of the wreckage and into one of those temporary EMS hospitals in the countryside. There was nothing wrong enough with him to be admitted into the hospital and there weren’t enough pilots left for Bertie to be allowed to rest quietly in a nursing home until he stopped shaking and stuttering. Peter had been officially sent to see what parts could be salvaged from the wreckage, and included Bertie in this reckoning. The bits of plane turned out to be melted scrap metal embedded too deep in the earth to be easily pried out. Bertie was not quite broken from this ordeal-- it was, after all, the fifth crash he had survived-- but as full repair was impossible, Bertie would need to be carefully transported and tended to, until another plane could be found for him. 

“Though, my luck’s still holding,” said Peter, trying for cheer. “Spotted a queer conchie orderly and got him to sit with Bertie, while I went off to have a look at the crash site. We all learnt from that trouble you had with the ether, when they were sewing up the cut on that leg of yours.”

It had been Sandy’s excuse for trying to adopt Laurie into his circle, after Dunkirk. Laurie had been very grateful, but had managed to resist Sandy’s overtures until Ralph and Alec became fast friends, at which point Laurie resigned himself to forever butting up resentfully against Sandy’s camp good humor. Laurie felt at the scar on his shin. “Lucky thing for me the hospitals were all teeming. Didn’t even notice the cough, they were so busy. Just had me walk out as soon as I could stand. They rather needed the beds. Sounds like it hasn’t got much better. Did you say that the orderlies were conscientious objectors? What are they, Quakers?”

“Yes.”

“Didn’t know there were queer ones,” said Laurie, thinking of Ralph’s allusions to his Plymouth Brethren childhood. “Or ones  _ let  _ to be queer.”

“I don’t know if there are supposed to be,” replied Peter. “But I’m pretty sure this one is.”  

Laurie had not made up his mind about conscientious objectors. Whenever they were mentioned, he felt vaguely embarrassed on their behalf, but he knew too little about them, and was, at present, too concerned with his own ill-health and naval gossip to pay them much attention.

Peter took his hand briefly off the wheel to rub at his forehead. The engine grease spread. “There’s a nursing shortage nearly as bad as the one for pilots. That’s how they got the Quakers in-- I think they all do ambulance service and the like during wars. Necessary work, you know. Not bad people. They were all apparently very kind when Bertie more-or-less burst into the hospital in the middle of Major What’s-His-Name’s rounds, his face all over blood and smoke, stuttering too badly to be intelligible. Had the wards in an uproar before a nurse thought to make an orderly give him a wash and a place in a side ward.”

Laurie looked uneasily at Peter. 

“Bad as Bim, last time Ralph had to put him to bed,” said Peter, quietly, not sure if this would help. Laurie had always been too secure in the knowledge of Ralph’s love to be jealous, but he currently resented Bim more than he usually did. During the last few hours of their forty-eight hour shore leave, Ralph had put Bim to bed while Laurie had gone into hospital to get treated for slight burns he’d gotten from helping Theo put out an incendiary fallen near Peter’s digs. Laurie’s cough had so alarmed the nurses he hadn’t been allowed to leave. The next morning Ralph had gone off to the armed trawler they were supposed to be on together, as lieutenant and sub to a lieutenant commander, and Laurie had gone into a fit of black despair in the middle of a hospital ward. He’d almost been grateful for Sandy, then.

“Ralph’s doing well, isn’t he?” asked Peter, trying to steer Laurie away from these thoughts. 

“Oh, I think so,” said Laurie, trying to be cheerful. “He’s in the Home Fleet, not the Atlantic, as nearabouts as I can tell. The trawler he’s on hasn’t sunk yet. I suppose you heard me telling Theo that they might give him command of a trawler himself, soon. I mean, that’s what I think he meant to write. The captain censored his last letter so much it was more lacuna than text. I’m out of archaeological patterns of thought-- it was hard filling in the gaps.”

“Here we are,” said Peter, slowing the car to a stop, right before the entrance. “I’ve been promised a cup of coffee by the ward sister and I’m rather desperate for it. It was horrible, the crash site. One could see... most of it was burned, but there was... one can always tell by the shape of it, what he... what it used to be.”

“I wish I could offer you something stronger, but they searched my pockets before letting me into the hospital,” said Laurie.  

Peter smiled tiredly. “Give us a shout and I’ll come help you with Bertie, when he’s... he’s well enough to go back.” 

Laurie tucked the scarf his mother had knit him more securely about his throat as he walked into the hospital. He was painfully conscious of the slowness of his gait, the feverishness of his gaze. He rather wished for Ralph’s crispness and briskness of manner, to at least distinguish him a bit from the ambulatory patients trying to see what the RAF officer had got up to. All Laurie could manage was a sort of authoritative kindness and, as he entered the side ward where he, sang, hoarsely, “ _ Forty-seven ginger-headed saiiilors, coming home across the briny sea-- _ ”

Bertie, a tattered, grimy figure perched like a crow on a snow pile on the edge of the hospital bed, automatically sang back, “ _ When the anchor’s made and the journey weighed, they’ll start the party with a... a... _ ” He lost the thread of the song, looking vague almost to the point of concussion. Laurie was involuntarily reminded of Keats:  _ I see a lily on thy brow, with anguish moist and fever dew _ . “Ch-ch-christ, I’ve cuh...” He got stuck on the ‘c’ but persisted until he got out, “c-c-cocked it all up. You duh... don’t make anchor, du... do you, Sssss-- Luh, Laurie?”

“I’m not ginger anymore, either,” said Laurie, taking off his cap. “Haven’t been since I was eighteen. Face it, Bertie, you can’t keep singing that like you did when I first went into the RNVR.”

“Cuh... can’t very well sing Muh....”

“Mozart,” supplied the orderly, quietly. 

“Him at you,” said Bertie, and tried, with difficulty, to strike a match to light his cigarette. His hands shook so much he dropped the first few. Laurie made a motion to come forward. Bertie tried to start protesting, but got stuck on the ‘d’ of ‘don’t,’ so Laurie turned his back on him to smile at the orderly. He found he could not stop.

“I’m Andrew Raynes,” said the orderly. He looked to be about eighteen, with fair hair, the color of old gilt, and very clear gray eyes, that showed up very bright in his tanned face. “But call me Andrew. We don’t use last names much, amongst the Friends.”

“Lieutenant Laurence Odell,” said Laurie, thinking, ‘one can’t very well go on staring like a fool, like this. Better say something.’ “I’d offer my hand to shake, but I’m still getting over a spot of pneumonia I picked up after Dunkirk. It wasn’t really warm enough for sea bathing, but Jerry did insist. Quite blew up the sloop I was on to ensure I would.” He felt a strange detachment from himself and his actions. He was rambling but could not seem to stop himself.  “Bertie and I were at Oxford together. Still both have a year to go, actually. God, I can hear the tutors now: he’s spent all this time studying Tchaikovsky, why is he singing all these comic songs? I’m quite keen on Tchaikovsky, myself.”

Bertie was not a perceptive fellow, but, knowing how Laurie peered out at their shadowy part of the world from a privileged, high place behind the steady bulwark of Ralph’s love, trusted him to point out other members of their secret brotherhood. He followed Laurie’s lead and picked up a hairpin. “Study muh... much Tch-tchtch-tch--”

“Tchaikovsky,” supplied Andrew Raynes.

“--yourself?” asked Bertie. He at last managed to light a match, and held it up to his cigarette. “Sssssspud reads history. I should luh... like to talk muh... music with puh... people again.”

“Oh, I’m fond of it, but I haven’t much thought of what I’d sit for,” said Andrew. Then, perhaps fearing he was being unsocial, he smiled, with unexpected warmth, and said, “I do quite  _ like  _ Tchaikovsky.”

“Duh... did you know he was cuh... cuh... queer?” asked Bertie, looking a little better, now that he had to focus on dropping a hair pin, instead of processing last night’s dogfight. “I ruh... read it, at Oxford. Wuh... worked its way into his music.”

“Did it? I hadn’t known. I don’t remember hearing that he was ever locked up or treated or anything. I suppose I would have heard if he’d spent his last years in a mad house, though.”

“Ssssorry,” said Berte, with a small, wounded smile at Andrew. “I’m not ssssspeaking cuh... clearly. I yuh... usually only guh... get ssssstuck every cuh... consonant in a huh... hundred. N-n-not on them all.”

Laurie patted Bertie on the shoulder. “Well you’d had a knock on the head, I don’t doubt. But, er. Tchaikovsky wasn’t mad, you know,” Laurie tried to clarify. “Just queer.”

Andrew looked at them with a genial puzzlement. “I suppose all Russians are generally strange to us, because we don’t share any language or customs.”

‘We certainly aren’t sharing a language now,’ thought Laurie, but as this was the sort of catty thing he expected Bim-- or worse,  _ Bunny _ \-- to say, he kept mum. Well, he coughed a bit, but it was more because of the pneumonia than the missed hairpin. “Come now, old chap-- let’s let Andrew back to his ward duties. Peter will lift us back to your digs; I’ve a late pass, so I’ll stay with you until you’re feeling a bit more the thing. Need the lav?”

“It’s that way,” said Andrew, gently.

Bertie slid unsteadily off the bed. Laurie went hunting for the rest of Bertie’s things, but it appeared that he was wearing everything that had survived the crash.

“I hope Peter has a rug or something,” said Laurie and then, looking up, smiled and said, “Bertie’s stopped talking about how bad it’s gotten. Our friend Alec’s a medical student, and he keeps saying that the stutter’s come back as a result of all that. Thank you for sitting with him.”

“Of course.” Then with an almost child-like sincerity, “My father was called ‘Bertie.’ I had to, you see?”

“I do.”

“I hope he’ll be alright.”

Laurie didn’t know how to answer this. “I think you’ve helped. I was expecting poor old Bertie to be twitching and jumping like the people in the trenches of the last war, and aside from the stutter, he’s really quite calm. Here--” finding a bit of paper “--have you got a pen or a pencil or something? If they ever let you out of this place, why don’t you come look Bertie up? Bertie’s got a piano and a gramophone. He can play you any Tchaikovsky you like.” He coughed a bit, half out of embarrassment, half out of pneumonia, and added, “Bertie’s promised me the spare room once I’m out of hospital. They’ve finally decided to give me penicillin, so it shouldn’t take long. Peter’s over, too. There’s usually a group of us, talking music. Amongst other things.”

“Thanks very much,” said Andrew, politely. “I expect I shall be here for quite some time, settling in. But I shall look you up, if I have a free evening.”  

Bertie’s Bridstow digs were, like victory rolls before landing, not technically allowed, but difficult to deny to RAF officers. It helped that Bertie’s uncle-- always alluded to as a useful toff with a title-- had found and paid for the rooms, in memory of what he would have liked to have had while he had served in the RAF during the Great War.  

It took some doing to get Bertie up into said digs. He had fallen into an exhausted sleep in the back of the car, and gone into an involuntary panic when Peter and Laurie, not liking to wake him, tried to lift him out. Laurie recalled that just last month Bertie had had to be pulled from his smoking plane and given oxygen right there on the tarmac, because he hadn’t been able to release himself from his harness after landing. The landlady had come out to stare by the time Bertie had come back to himself, and realized that he was in a car that was not in the least bit on fire. 

“It’s alright, Miss Mansell,” said Laurie quickly. He’d more of a talent for improvisation than Peter. “We’ve got Bertie-- he’s just--”

“Ah yes,” she said, looking worriedly at him. “I heard there was a crash outside of the city.”

Bertie was going to lose it any second. His grip on reality was too tenuous still. He kept almost touching the metal of the car door, as if to reassure himself he wasn’t still in a Spitfire. Laurie flashed a smile he’d learnt from Ralph and said, “Yes-- that’s it. But it’s a nice cloudy day this morning, no chance of a raid,  _ right  _ Peter?”

“Precisely,” said Peter, looking worriedly down at Bertie. 

“Buh... benzedrine’s all I need,” said Bertie, feeling at his tattered flight jacket and trying, very valiantly, to hold himself together. 

“No, no, old bean, you’ve had too much benzedrine as is,” Laurie said, in his best head prefect tones. “We’re going to go inside and have a nice sedative.”

“You alright yourself Lieutenant?” asked Miss Mansell, rather worriedly. “You sound--”

“Came away from Dunkirk with pneumonia,” said Laurie, feeling suddenly and inexpressibly tired. “Better than a lot of other chaps, really. I’m back to hospital once I get Bertie settled. Come on, old bean, up to bed with you.”

This plan went about as well as could be expected-- which was not very. 

Bertie got upstairs and wanted a bath. This was an acceptable delay; Peter went out and came back with sandwiches in wax paper, and Laurie made and turned down the bed. Bertie then tried to hide his sedatives instead of taking them. Laurie had to threaten to mash them up into Bertie’s food, the way he made his dog back home take pills, before Bertie gave up on hiding them. Bertie agreed to take the pills, but they only freed him from coherent thought, not consciousness. When he finally did sleep, he woke at irregular intervals, gasping for breath, and pulling desperately on a parachute chord that wasn’t there. 

Peter had had to go back to work, so it fell to Laurie to settle Bertie again-- and again, and again. He gave it up as a bad job around five-o-clock and said, “Christ, Bertie, they need to get you better dope. How about we get drunk?”

Berite wiped the feverish sweat off his forehead with the sleeve of his lemon yellow pyjama jacket. “Huh... how drunk?”

“Blind.”

“ _ Please _ .” 

They ate fish and chips out of greasy newspaper as they walked. Out of consideration for Bertie’s usual need for company after the benzedrine wore off, rather than any real inclination, Laurie took him to the horrible chrome and plastic leather pub where, in the words of Sandy Reid, “one met people.” Laurie did not always like to go. Far too many people there seemed to think there was no love other than sexual, and if Laurie came in without Ralph, the immediate assumption was not ‘Spud Odell has come in to help out a friend so hopped up on bennies the sedative no longer cancels it out,’ but ‘ _ quelle scandale,  _ Spud Odell’s cheating on Ralph Lanyon.’ 

There were at least enough people there that there was some conversation that was not petty, and Bertie was not left to fall into the tangle of bad memories. Laurie had learnt the sailor’s way of quickly sailing three sheets to the wind, but, as he was tired and feeling ill already, set the neat tots of double rum before Bertie, and ordered a gin and tonic for himself. 

Laurie was beginning to relax when Bertie stumbled off to the lav, and the air raid siren began to sound. He glanced around. A gaggle of men in assorted uniforms were looking out the door, slurring out, “You call that a raid, Jerry?” and “Not ready for another pounding like last night, eh?” and other, more vulgar things. A naval officer at the door leaned suggestively over an RAF gunner, and translated, “Just the one plane.”

“Near here?” asked Laurie.

It was a midshipman rather than a lieutenant. He offered Laurie’s uniform a lazy salute as he sauntered away. “No, lieutenant. Rather high up. They mean to go further inland, I should think.”

The bartender had been shooing everyone in, and telling them to help with the blackout curtains as punishment for letting light spill out the door. Most of them did, but one of the flight lieutenants broke off, caught the word, ‘lieutenant,’ and looked searchingly around the bar. 

Laurie almost hadn’t recognized Bim. He looked nearly as bad as Bertie. It was almost more shocking, because Bim was forever in Laurie’s memory the cruelly handsome undergraduate, a fierce and graceful little fighting cock bent on pecking out his eyes. “Er, hallo Bim.”  

“Oh, Auntie Laurie,” said Bim, hiding his disappointment that Laurie was not Ralph in a hard, gay sparkle. “It is a pleasure to see you again. It never really feels like leave until you look up from your tatting to tut-tut me and envelop me in a nice thick blanket of Victorian prudery.”

Laurie suddenly realized that Bim and Bertie were the only two original pilots left in their squadron. This must have shown itself in his face, for Bim looked quickly away and seized Laurie’s just delivered gin and tonic. “I thought you were coughing like an operatic soprano, locked away in hospital. What on earth dragged you into the world of the nominally living?”

“Bertie,” said Laurie, feeling surprised Bim didn’t know this already.

Bim downed Laurie’s drink. 

“He’s... it’s too much to say he’s alright, not when... Peter called Alec and Alec sprung me out of hospital. We went to fetch Bertie from where he’d pitched up in an EMS hospital. I made him sleep a little, but he had nightmares that he didn’t bail out in time, and so we came out.”

“Yes, I’ve had that one myself,” said Bim, a little of his hard glitter flaking off, like an old costume shedding sequins in the village Christmas panto. “ _ Not  _ a one for repeated viewing, but really, my dear, they show it so much it’s hard to avoid. Where is Bertie?”

“In the lav.”

“ _ Well _ ,” said Bim, reverting back to the camp Laurie found so irritating. 

“It’s just the lav, he couldn’t bear to let me and Peter touch his elbows to get him out of the car-- not,” added Laurie, with a flash of temper, “that it’s any of my business what he gets up to, as long as he isn’t slitting his wrists over the sink.”

“You’re quite correct on that count,” said Bim. “My word, Ralph moulded you to some idiotically high standards, didn’t he? There’s no need to sniffle disapprovingly, like someone’s maiden aunt, because Bertie could  _ possibly  _ be enjoying himself with someone other than the probably dead Reggie. You never even  _ met  _ Reggie, I suppose. It’s all courtly love and troubadour poetry and Neoplatonic chastity though, so of course you’re on his side, even against the needs of a living friend who you just had to scrape out of a plane crash.”

Laurie signaled for the bartender, instead of doing what he really wanted, and punching Bim in the face. Bim, he told himself, had fallen into a pattern of continual fighting. It wasn’t his fault that the benzedrine didn’t wear off easily, and he’d been so long on shift he didn’t know how to act off of it. Bertie was good-natured to the point of occasional idiocy, and was better able to sink into a thoughtless stupor when released from helmet and harness. It wasn’t fair to either of them to compare their off-duty behavior.

“Ralph was  _ just  _ the same way when I first met him at Cambridge,” said Bim. “Pining himself into a state of existential torment. Poor, neurotic thing. Never managed to successfully integrate his personality, but holds it all together with ruthless self-discipline and a sort of bleak courage. I always thought it must be spectacular when he fell apart mid-fu--”

“Anything for you?” Laurie interrupted loudly. Bim was the sort of person who didn’t like to buy his own drinks.

“Whatever you were just drinking was quite good.”

“A rum and two gin and tonics.” Laurie faithfully set aside Bertie’s rum, before Bim could get at it, and slid Bim the first gin and tonic. It was the sort of gesture his mother might make, to smooth things over. Bim did not much notice. It was unclear if this was because of the benzedrine, or just because of his personality.

“Yes, it would have done Ralph  _ so  _ much good, if he wasn’t trying to work what he was into a kind of religion,” said Bim, sipping his drink, “but I was always telling our set that first year-- you get involved with R. R. Lanyon on the understanding that you’re never going to measure up to this boy he left back at his school, because Ralph could mould him to be the queer of his dreams--”

“I’m my own person, thanks,” said Laurie, shortly. Why did Bim have to always make it sound so sordid? “We were just friends until he was a Cambridge man.” He rather wished he could have said instead ‘until I was eighteen,’ which would have expunged all the horrid implications Bim was sprinkling into their conversation, like powdered sugar over a sponge, but life was rarely that neat. “Friends in the good old English sense of the term. I don’t know what ideas you’ve gotten, or what your school was like, but the prefects at my school didn’t make a habit of molesting the younger boys.” 

“My  _ dear _ ,” said Bim, with an affectation of innocence, “whoever was saying  _ that _ ? I’m just saying it would have done poor old Ralph rather a lot of good if he’d slept around more before settling down to domesticated life.”

“If he’d slept with you, you mean?” asked Laurie, unable to keep his temper in check any longer. 

“Who said we hadn’t?” 

“Ralph, for one,” said Laurie, with impatience. “D’you really think we’d have been six-- nearly seven years together without his telling me everything? Look, I’m not going to apologize for visiting Ralph during the Easter hols and telling him I loved him, before you could do everything you wanted with him. It’s just the way things shook out. And I’m not going to apologize for holding my behavior to a higher standard than--” Damn it, Bim wouldn’t know Charles Fortescue “--than  _ Bunny _ ’s set.”

Laurie and Theo had been indignant with horror upon finding that the new fellow in the wavy navy lieutenant’s cuffs had been  _ Bunny  _ instead of someone more of their temperament and ideology. (Bunny, as Theo had later, cuttingly said, was the sort of nickname a grammar school boy gave himself in imitation of the public school boys. Peter had-- it had to be admitted, quite rightly-- taken Theo and Laurie to task for being unjustifiable snobs. Theo and Laurie had drunkenly talked in Latin to each other the rest of the evening. Why they had thought this was a clever reaction to Peter’s legitimate criticism was lost to rum, only forty-eight hours shore leave, and the general mental fog caused by Laurie’s untreated pneumonia.)

“My goodness, sweetie, I never thought you had anything in common with Bunny,” said Bim cuttingly. “Grasping the wrong end of the stick, aren’t we? Not that you grasp many--”

“Look, what are you expecting to get out of this conversation?” demanded Laurie. His voice sounded too loud. He wondered if it had been a terrible idea to mix penicillin and gin. No one had told him not to, but, then again, none of the nurses or actual doctors thought he’d be racketing around Bridstow with not one, but two shell-shocked RAF pilots hopped up on too much benzedrine. “You’ve tried to have this conversation with me ever since we met, and usually I can ignore it, but I’ve had a bloody awful few weeks, kept away from Ralph and my proper station because of the illness that killed my father, and I just realized this morning that Bertie’s one of maybe three friends of mine from Oxford who haven’t yet died, and he’s now been in five separate crashes. You want this row, you can have it.”

“I...” Bim looked, for just a moment, to be his proper age, and more than a little lost. “I just can’t understand why you cling to convention when we are all such unconventional people.” 

“There’s enough odd about us to make us need convention rather more than other people,” said Laurie. “I don’t understand why you  _ don’t _ .”

“Yes, as you always are so kind to make clear.” Bim knocked back his drink and looked expectant. Laurie thought of saying something about leaving Bim to find more convivial company, but Bim pressed on, “This society was not made for us, or even with us in mind.”

“So is your answer just to throw everything over? There are things that we owe the people around us, that we can’t just lay aside because we think we haven’t been fairly treated. If someone is suffering besides you, you do what you can to help, don’t you, even if you’re injured yourself? And especially if they’re injured worse than you are? And you do it in a way that actually helps them and makes sense for them and their situation. You don’t just talk a lot of rot about how the world isn’t fair, you do your damndest to be of practical assistance.” 

“Hmph,” said Bim. “And this from quite the snobbiest member of the Oxbridge set. I always thought you’d be entrenched in the rights of the landed gentry, singing ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘God Save the King’ with tears in your eyes. People are so full of these fascinating contradictions.”

“I  _ am _ Irish,” said Laurie, feeling nettled. “I’m not exactly of unblemished English stock. People don’t call me Spud because I ate rather a lot of potatoes once, or something. I’m sorry I don’t quite fit your notions of what I ought to be. I rarely do for anyone.”

“Even Ralph?”

“Yes,” said Laurie, recklessly. “Particularly Ralph. And if he, as the person who is most concerned in it, learnt to deal with who I am and what I think is right, and can still be happy, then you can too, or--” and here he said something he’d picked up on the sloop during the endless evacuation of Dunkirk. 

To his utter incredulity, Bim burst out laughing and flung an arm around his shoulders. Laurie took a consolation in the fact that Bim had to stand on his toes to do so. Bim then laid a smacking kiss on Laurie’s cheek before Laurie could protest, or give a particularly infectious-sounding cough. “You really are the bitch to end all bitches, Lieutenant Odell. I’m so sorry I underestimated you. We might have been better friends if you hadn’t been so damned good looking at eighteen.”

Laurie was so astonished by this pronouncement he just sat there gawping. 

“No wonder Lanyon was so fixed on you. It’s really quite good for the rest of us, that you only caught up each other in your grand drama of duty and sacrifice, and didn’t damn anyone else. You both need a touch of brimstone about the bedroom, don’t you, my dear?” 

The All Clear sounded, thin and reedy above the wireless. 

“Bertie going to drink that?” Bim asked, reaching for the rum. “He's been awfully long in there. Must be some--”

Laurie felt himself turn sensationally white. He was almost dizzy from it.

“God, you are  _ Victorian _ . Your friend Bertie has sex! With men! Same as you!”

“No, I forgot the raid was on, and that the siren would be louder with all that tile--”

Bim caught on quickly, Laurie had to admit that. They both flung themselves from the bar and stumbled so quickly into the lavatory Claude called out campily, “That's right dearie, cut out the middle man! That's the best way to resolve love triangles.”

Laurie’s fears shifted when he saw that the sinks were still white and empty. Not that he really expected Bertie to off himself in the bathroom of a queer bar, he told himself. Bertie had often joked he would die in his Spitfire. The fact that Bertie was, statistically speaking, probably right, had always given Bertie a curious sort of disinclination for suicide.

Bertie was instead crouched in the little closet that held all the cleaning supplies, hands over his ears, humming Cole Porter songs to himself, to drown out any lingering sound of bombs. Laurie could tell he was stinking drunk; Bertie was usually a stickler for correct syncopation and now he was slurring and sweeping all over the place. Laurie coughed when he tried to sing, and Bertie didn’t hear him whistling. 

“Bertie, old bean,” said Laurie, in tones of forced heartiness. Bertie didn’t look up. “Bertie, it’s Spud. The All Clear’s sounded.”

Bim crouched down in front of Bertie and laid a gentle hand on Bertie’s elbow. Bim’s identity bracelet glinted prettily in the flourescent light of the bathroom. 

Bertie opened his eyes and said, fuzzily, “I’m suh...sorry, I duh... didn’t want to hear the suh... speaker tuh... telling me to run tuh... to the airf-f-f-f-f-field. Ssssstupid. I’m cuh... coming. Ssssquad cuh... commander ain’t too puh...pleased, I ‘spect.”

“We’re not on duty right now,” said Bim, gently. “We’re in  _ The Dark Horse _ , not the hut off the airfield. Spud says your sedatives aren’t working. I just got some marvelous bromide. Care to share?”

Laurie had always been exasperated by the fact that Bim so easily endeared himself to the people Laurie liked to keep close to himself. Now he felt like he was the interloper. However many naval ships were sunk by air raids, he did not and could not know how bad it was for the RAF. And evidently, it was  _ bad.  _

After listening to a drunk and rather incoherent protest, Bim tugged on Bertie’s elbow, to make him unfold, and kissed him on the nose. “What a silly ass you are, Bertie! Of course you want to sleep. You just don’t want to  _ dream _ . You know I don’t have digs in town. Why don’t I come back to your place and we get wonderfully knocked out by the new stuff Alec’s given me? Or shall we see if I can make you forget Reggie first?”

Laurie, mindful of how he’d been chided earlier, found that he was looking down with a frown and crossed arms. He moved his arms behind his back, naval style, and glanced over at his reflection in the mirrors above the sink. He  _ was  _ as pale as he had thought. He always had had a tendency to turn spectacularly white when ill.

“Oh yes, we’ll make sure Spud gets back to hospital before he gets in trouble with the night nurse.”

Though too tired to really parse Bertie’s stutter, Laurie rather thought an opprobrious remark had been made about his appearance. 

“Take a look at yourself, mate,” said Laurie, trying to affect a Cockney accent. It was so terrible an attempt Bertie and Bim both started laughing. They all struggled out of the bathroom. 

“Shall you be alright?” asked Laurie, as Bertie, who had a rich family, settled their tab. “You’ve seen the same actions.”

“Don’t worry, Spud,” said Bim, in a passable imitation of Ralph. Then, in his usual voice, “I haven’t seen quite so many flames. I’m better at bailing out than poor old Bertie, here. But I shan’t surrender to you, you know. We never do, in the RAF.”

“A temporary truce then,” said Laurie, as Bertie made his way over to them rather drunkenly. “Just until Bertie’s better, and I’m actually out of hospital, instead of being sprung out by the Alexanders.”

“Yes, like that Christmas armistice they had, last war,” agreed Bim. “We’ve been fighting about Ralph and all he represents for six years. It’ll keep another week. And anyways, right now I feel rather Dickensian and full of good will. Or is that gin?”

Laurie could not help himself. He said, rather cattily, “Probably gin.” 


End file.
